Why Don’t We Just Kill All the Mosquitoes?

mosquitos 4I’m just asking hypothetically.

Bat expert Merlin Tuttle cites an experiment in which bats released in a lab filled with mosquitoes caught around ten mosquitoes per minute. That’s 600 per hour, so 1,000 bats could consume over a half million mosquitoes per hour. The problem is that when bats have other food options, they wouldn’t eat mosquitoes at that rate. Mosquitoes are less than one percent of a bat’s diet.

In the 1920s near San Antonio, Tampa, and in the Florida Keys, the U.S. built “bat towers” to try and control the mosquitoes. It didn’t work. But they were able to sell the guano at a profit.

So we probably couldn’t kill every mosquito. Even if we could, they’d be replaced by some other insect. The American Mosquito Control Association warns against trying: “Be advised that species replacing mosquitoes may be even worse.”

How much worse could anything be?

Exactly

Article Appeared @http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/why-dont-we-just-kill-all-the-mosquitoes/277859/

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